Motivation

A detailed Summary of Motivation

Our motivation is what drives us to achieve success in all aspects of our lives. In text book terms, motivation is an internal state that arouses, directs, and maintains behavior. This means nothing to most people. To me motivation is something that everyone must have, in some form, to allow themselves to grow as individuals. Motivation is important, because without it think of the things we would not have today, or where the world would be. For everyone it is about finding your locus or source of motivation. There are four main general approaches to motivation. Each approach explains a different theory on where motivation comes from and what causes this type of motivation. Every person has a different way of being motivated and these are those types that help us succeed.

The first approach to motivation was the behavioral approach. The behavioral approach to motivation deals with people being motivated by an extrinsic resource, such as a reward given for the work done. First the individual is given an incentive such as, "if you receive an "A+" on your paper you can go to the water park." Once the incentive is given the individual is now going to attempt to gain the reward by ge

The last approach to motivation is social learning. Social learning is a type of motivation that was theorized by Bandura and his ideas in self-efficacy. Social learning motivation is brought on by both extrinsic and intrinsic reinforcement . The source of social learning motivation for us comes from our expectation to reach our goal and the value of that goal to us. This idea of two forces causing motivation is called the expectancy x value theories. The most important part of social learning motivation is our own beliefs of our own self-efficacy. Our self-efficacy is the belief of our own competence. When given a particular situation we think of what could happen in the future based on what happened in the past. Then we also think how we will be able to perform in the particular situation based on other events. According to Bandura, we consider this when we set our goals. We will set tougher goals and be able to get through any difficulties if we have a high sense of self-efficacy. If we do not have a high sense then we will not do certain tasks or avoid them altogether. Our self-efficacy is also related to our attributions. Bandura states that when we have high sense of self-efficacy we attribute failure to our own lack of effort. When we have a low sense of self-efficacy we will attribute our lack of failure to our own lack of ability. In my first year of high school I decided I wanted to continue wrestling and wrestle for the school. The first thing I thought about was if I was going to be able to make the team. "How hard am I going to have to work to get a place on the team?" Then I also took into consideration that there was a junior varsity team and a varsity team. Then I started to think how important getting on the team is to me. "If I only make junior varsity, is it worth it? " When I started to consider this I decided to try harder because I wanted to be on the varsity team only. Well, I worked as hard as I could and was pretty sure no one could beat me for the varsity spot in my weight class. I was satisfied with myself for working so hard. Then three days before we officially wrestled for positions a junior walked in. He had been injured during football and recovered. We knew each other from football and joked around about him wrestling. Then I found out that he was an amazing wrestler. I thought that I was not going to be able to beat him and since I told myself no junior varsity, I quit. I decide that it was much easier for me to avoid the failure than even taking the chance. I wanted to work hard to be on the team, but I felt that the outcome would not be worth it. The next year I went through the same thing with wrestling on the mat and in my mind, but this time I set my expectancies to just getting on the team. Then when it came time to officially wrestle for positions I was a lot more relaxed. I knew I was on the team and I was satisfied with that. Then we wrestled and I made varsity. The reason for this example, is that it shows what can go wrong with social learning motivation. If either the value of the goal or expectancy from the goal is zero then nothing will be achieved. When I was figuring out how to go about wrestling I should have had a different reason to succeed, for example, just to keep my body in shape. For any situation that you want to succeed in this type of motivation, in my opinion, will work, but if you are not sure of the outcome, stay away.

tting an "A" on the paper. This is the reward that will bring good grades. This works, especially with children, because the good work is rewarded by something else. The criticize of this theory is that, the goal is the reward and not the hard work or the good grade. When a reward is not offered for hard work then the individual will not want to work hard for nothing. When I was a child I was offered a certain dollar amount for my grades. Each grade being a certain amount of money and in

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